Category: Interactive

In an effort to get more people to wait for the red light at pedestrian crossings, car manufacturer Smart redesigned the experience as part of their promotional safety campaign WhatAreYouFOR. A really fantastic concept, it uses a nearby booth and cameras to translate the dance moves of members of the public into the red traffic light man in real time. Its a really fun and engaging idea that seems to have achieved its purpose of making the public take notice and wait, as it resulted in 81% more people stopping at the crossing.

Crowdsourcing has become an often used tactic by companies recently, especially by Walkers with their many ‘do us a flavour’ competitions. The latest to jump on this bandwagon though is none other than McDonald’s, who have recently launched a ‘Build Your Own Burger’ campaign to come up with new flavours for their menu. Their UK stores have teamed up with digital agency Razorfish London to create a ‘Burger Builder’ that allows you design your dream burger from a list of ingredients that contain both standard ones such as cheese and bacon, as well as new ones like guacamole and pineapple. Five winning designs will be released for a week each over a five-week period similar to the McDonald’s Tastes of America campaign.

The competition has proved incredibly successful so far, with well over 52,000 unique designs currently submitted. However, a look through the ‘most popular’ tab shows that it may not have had the desired effect, as many of them are just gluten-free versions of burgers already on the McDonald’s menu. There are though a few really interesting sounding ones, such as (and I’m definitely not being biased here) my Sweet ‘N’ Smokey burger.

Crowdsourcing in this way is definitely popular and is a really nice way to get customers involved even more closely with the iconic McDonald’s brand. Its created a really interesting look at what other people consider their dream burger to be, as you can definitely create some odd combinations with flavours like brie slices, guacamole and pesto mayonnaise. I’m interested to see what the final five are.

Everyone knows that Coca-Cola are great at producing innovative, exciting advertising campaigns. I’ve talked about them several times on this blog, here, here and here, about their various different “share happiness” campaigns. This one however was definitely one that made me think “I wish I’d thought of that” and also made me wonder why they hadn’t created it sooner as it seems to me to be the obvious thing to do based on the slogan.

Ogilvy & Mather Singapore came up with the simple idea of having the can itself as the thing being shared. A simple twist and pull splits it in half, allowing you to share the product with a friend and the above video shows just how popular it was. It even features a nice little nod to Jonathan Mak’s Coca-Cola advert at the end.

Not wanting to be outdone on the creative advertising front, Pepsi created their own campaign with the help of Belgian advertising company TBWA.

Simply liking the Pepsi Facebook page gives you a free Pepsi in a way similar to the previous Coca-Cola campaigns that gave you free stuff for doing things. It’s perhaps too similar I feel, as although it’s using something innovative that Coca-Cola hasn’t used before in Facebook likes, the whole principle behind the idea is just the same. But that’s just my opinion.

So I found this the other day when I should have been finishing off work for the deadline I had on Friday, and it shows just how far website design has come since the mid 90’s. Space Jam was one of my favourite films when I was growing up and I’m a bit of a sucker for good web design at the moment after designing one for the past few weeks for a project of mine.

Retro design and a complete inconsistency across the pages make this website so bad its good! Who doesn’t want bright, colourful, slightly illegible text on a starry background with all manner of clickable objects and menus? Viewing it brought back some great memories of watching the film and I had great fun viewing all the pages and taking part in a trivia quiz I found by clicking on a randomly placed button. Is it too late to nominate this for best website of 1996?

So they’ve done it again. Obviously not content with the fantastic interactive advertising of theirs that I have looked at before, Coca-Cola has really pushed the levels of interaction between the public and vending machine in these two new campaigns.

The first is from Korea where they seem to have taken a leaf out of Fantastic Delites book by getting the public to work for their free Coke. Korea seems to have a lot of professional break-dancers and hand-shakers by the looks of it.

If you’re anything like me, you might have been watching the Olympics over the past few days and been left confused by the rules of some of the events and competitions. Well that’s no longer a problem thanks to this beautifully designed app from Wilson Fletcher which features some great illustrations by Ryan Todd.

Katie Buchanan, a Wilson Fletcher designer, came up with the idea last year at Wimbledon after hearing a member of the crowd ask a friend how many times the ball could bounce!

This fantastic advertising campaign from Australian company “Fantastic Delites” shares similarities with that of the Coca-Cola advertising campaigns which I looked at a few months ago as it involves a machine dispensing free items. The main difference with this one though is that members of the public had to work for their prize.

Tasks from pressing a button a huge number of times, to doing crazy dances resulted in a free pack of snacks for the participant. This creates a great element of interaction between the public and the campaign due to the large crowds which showed up to see people potentially embarrass themselves in public.